


Unintended sequelae

by Sionnan



Category: True Detective
Genre: Marty is a mother hen, sensory flashbacks to Rust's narco days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 18:10:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15006467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sionnan/pseuds/Sionnan
Summary: A vignette of how Marty deals with Cohle’s ever devolving sanity and health, and how Cohle’s days as Crash sneak back up on him periodically.





	Unintended sequelae

In all honesty, he hadn’t fucked anything for near-on 6 or 7 years, hadn’t even whacked off one. Before he’d gotten out from undercover, he was so doped to the fucking gills that his sex drive was either massively confused or non-existent. When he was so hard he could fuck a hole in the wall was usually when he couldn’t distinguish a human from a wall, nor could he recall particulars of the circumstances either, so if there were any kind of sexual encounters, they had an equal chance of being figments and fragmentations of his mind, or something akin to rape. He’d certainly never been in his right mind to agree to fucking anything or anyone. 

Marty would have scoffed, pulled out the bullshit that men couldn’t be raped. If a man was hard, he was willing. Rust couldn’t possibly count the number of times he’d seen junkies so high and so hard they’d fuck a plate glass window. There was another level of human interaction, a special kind of hell, watching people become animals and fuck the nearest warm body.

The other times, the drugs shriveled up his balls and dick well enough that he was pretty sure he was regressing to prepubescence, standing in the john and trying to get a grip on his dick to take a proper piss. That and the malnutrition. He’d shed probably 30 to 40 pounds during his time under narc, after Sofia died, after the divorce.

There were times where he wasn’t hungry, so jacked up out of his mind, lying on whatever scumfuck mattress he’d been using to crash. He’d lay there for days, hardly shifting, his thoughts a formless morass that seemed incohate with the surroundings and entirely independent.

Still happens, sometimes. Usually on his days off, when he hadn’t meant to crash, just felt that slow lethargy creeping into his limbs, into his mind, where everything felt like he was partly living in the strange, surreal planescape of a dream.

When the lethargy would turn into dizzy spells or vertigo that became strong enough to actually knock him on his ass, Rust would generally aim for the mattress on the floor, the only generally soft space in his living area. Crawl atop the violently pitching horizon, and lay there until unconsciousness or a muted kind of coma stole over him.

He still lost days to that, on long weekends. Rarer now than before, maybe only once or twice a year. Marty had once shown up to his apartment trying to find him, and Rust hadn’t even had a collected enough sense to realize someone was at the door, knocking, hollering, calling his name.

Or rather, he heard all these things, but peripherally, the way you would notice the sounds of traffic on a far off highway. This was only semi rectified when Marty broke his dumb ass in through the back door, and came to find him on the mattress like some kind of viciously well trained hound dog.

He did hear the “Jesus Christ,” that Marty hailed somewhere near his bedside, but didn’t quite register that either. The lethargy crawled around inside his skull and scrambled his brains and thoughts to the point of incoherence. 

He saw Marty in front of him, but it was recognition the way you would a thing in a painting; not quite real, but there. He recognized three sharp sounds, saw the flat-Marty snapping his fingers. A whistle. There were too many things happening, and he felt his brain welter with the additional stimuli.

He closed his eyes, and felt a good sharp crack across his cheek, but numbly, like you would feel the way someone hitting you over a heavy jacket. These sensations became less and less immediate, until he stopped collecting them altogether, the only thing left the quiet pulsing images and sounds in the darkness of his mind.

Marty had tried the front door to no avail, hammering, slapping, and rattling the knob until one of Rust’s sketchy-eyed neighbors skittered to a door across the hall and glared at Marty dead-eyed.

Marty treated the person, who was too far into poverty and drug abuse and the horrors of humanity to really have a fixed sex, to a good hard cop stare, still rattling the door. The scumbag disappeared quickly, and Marty resumed his task of rounding up his partner. This fucking asshole had the nerve to not show up in front of their weekly briefing, and Marty was probably going to at the very least give him a piece of his mind. If that fuckhead had started on the drugs again, he was going to drown him in his own goddamn shower.

He stepped to one of the shrouded windows, and tried to get a glimpse inside, saw only a frustrating sliver of a tousled room. No sign of Rust.

Fuck this. He was going to go through the back door. It had a flimsier lock, as Marty had expected, and he made short work of busting the lock without harming the frame.

The smell of stale air, cigarette smoke, and unwashed body hit him like a wall. He stepped back for a second out of sheer instinct, before squinting and moving forward again. No sounds, for all Marty fucking knew, the guy could be sleeping off a goddamn bender somewhere in that redneck pickup of his.

He gave a long sigh through his nose, picking his way past piles of books and papers, loaded ashtrays, astonishingly little food or clothing detritus, his cop’s brain picking up on this details before he could summon it to a willful silence. He made his way into the living room, and caught sight of Rust immediately, stretched across the mattress.

A quiet little “Jesus Christ,” left Marty’s lips just then, somewhere between a curse and a supplication. Rust Cohle was lying mostly naked, on his side, on the bare mattress, ribs poking up sharply through what seemed like all-too thin skin covering his frame, his hip bone jutting up in sharp relief. For a brief second where dread dropped his heart into his crotch, he was pretty certain Rust was dead. He had the feel of a fucking corpse, lying there.

And then Rust’s ribs expanded ever so slowly, and sank again, and Marty felt a confusing mix of anger, sorrow, and disappointment. Like watching a sick animal, close to death, last muscular impulse shivering through it’s body, just sort of wishing that anything suffering like that would please, for the mercy of God, just fucking die already.

He stepped closer, rolling Rust onto his back, and checked his pulse. Slow, very faint. His skin was cold, even in that heat, and had a strange, musty smell, like he had sweated and cooled in the same spot without cleaning or even moving. Marty hated himself for noticing this, finding the intimacy of examining a victim, a body applied to his fairly alive partner disconcerting and unwelcome.

“Rust,” he said again, trying to pull Rust’s attention somewhere into reality. Or even consciousness. Rust’s eyes, those sharp slate blue eyes, were dull and hooded, and glassy. Barely human. Marty swallowed, feeling that same kind of superstitious fear curl around his chest. Rust probably would have said something stupid and incoherent about the person existing in two worlds, tethered to neither.

As it was, Rust was currently neither living nor dead. Fuck fuck fuck. Marty passed a hand over his mouth, one of his many nervous tells, then snapped his fingers experimentally in front of Cohle’s eyes, tracing his fingers back and forth. Rust never blinked or tracked his motion, and Marty was beginning to feel more panic and irritation bud.

He’d never asked to be this man’s fucking keeper, and at some point a person had to realize their own limits, recognize, and take responsibility for them. Rust in this state meant that he’s very much missed the fucking responsibility boat somewhere.

Instead, he watched as Cohle’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he felt a slice of panic, and gave a quick shout, a panicked whistle, trying to recall his partner back from the brink he recognized Rust was heading.

No luck. Not even a quick slap would rouse the other guy. He switched positions enough to give the bony rib cage a sternum rub, feeling disturbed at the ridges of the bones grinding against his knuckles. All this got was a long exhale, and Marty sat back on his heels again, grimacing.

Shitfire.

He checked Rust’s pulse– faint, kind of rapid, and let his general assumption swing in the direction of Cohle having passed out, fucking finally, from lack of sleep, too little food, and too much… whatever the hell this was. Probably his brain trying to get a little goddamn peace, looking at the case files and books stacked around.

Marty stood, cracking his neck. The silence in the apartment pissed him off, so he walked into Rust’s kitchen, poured himself a few fingers of Jack, and then got a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator. It had been there so long the concentrate had begun to separate from the water, and Marty grimaced.

After a few seconds of thought, he gave a sigh, feeling irritation give way to resignation, and concern. He snagged a washcloth from next to the kitchen sink, and found Rust semi conscious now, eyes tracking the ceiling. “Well, hey, sunshine. Glad to see your shiny ass could join us normal people in the land of the living.” He couldn’t summon anything but a kind of weary chipperness to his tone, and swiped the washcloth across Cohle’s forehead, neck and face.

Rust shuddered under the chill, and flailed his long limbs as though to fight it off. Marty took another sip of his Jack, and then considering, asked, “How many drugs are you fucked up on, Rust?”

Rust seemed to be fighting to regain some semblance of cognizance,and blinked at him. “Marty? The hell you doing here?” His voice was slurred and indistinct, probably from the lack of blood to his brain after the faint, and most likely also from drugs.

“Well? Come on. I just gotta figured if I need to get your ass shipped to a hospital to get your stomach pumped.”

“Fuck you. I can handle my drugs, asshole.”

Marty’s eyebrows flicked, and he drained his glass. That had been a good deal more vehement than he’d expected coming out of his partner’s mouth, so he chalked down the minor mood swing without comment, and handed him the cold glass of orange juice. “Drink. It’ll raise your blood sugar.”

Rust took the glass, and swilled half of it in one long swallow, gagged against it, prompting Marty to lean away. After a beat, Rust finished the other half, dropped the glass to the carpet, and sunk his head against his hands, as though to ward off an ice-pick headache.

The man seemed to wallow in fucking silence. When he wasn’t blathering on about some weird, next level metaphorical shit, he hardly opened his mouth. Marty worked his mouth for a second, then asked, “Well?”

“Yeah.”

“Better?”

“Yeah, better.”


End file.
